by B. Nyamnjoh
The descent to Sawang International Airport was breathtaking. The plane plunged gently through the clouds, revealing a vast and extensive sea of green in glorious synchrony with the sleeves of the Atlantic Ocean. This was the once virgin rainforest Lilly Loveless had only read about or seen in documentaries on TV. Even with the pride of its virginity gone, the balding rainforest was still a rare environmental hope in a world busy writing cheques the environment couldn’t possibly cash. The sooner more and more people understood that one can only command nature by obeying it, the better for all and sundry. Her heart flowed out to the mangroves below and to the shorelines of the beach to the east, full of colourful fishing boats and people in screaming attires. But her enthusiasm was tempered just as they approached the runway – a maze of grey shacks rose from the swamps like a nightmare. Greyer, because of the rain.
The landing was smooth.
After touchdown, the woman to her right offered Lilly Loveless a box of 250 condoms, saying “life’s too sweet and too short to waste”. Lilly Loveless broke out into a big smile and thanked her for the timely gift, having forgotten to bring some along despite repeated insistence by her reluctant mom. The woman also handed her a business card saying, “Don’t hesitate to give me a call if you need something while in Mimboland.” What a lofty mission she had! In a continent already devastated by lords of war, it made all the sense in the world to snatch what was left of life from the jaws of HIV/AIDs with laudable actions like hers.
“A few thunder clouds shouldn’t dampen your enthusiasm,” the man to her right told Lilly Loveless, giving her his card, on which he had added by hand his personal cell phone number. As they separated, he whispered to her with his eyes, “I’m waiting for you in Nyamandem. Call me.” She looked at the card which had a Nyamandem address on one side and a Muzunguland address on the other: “Honourable Epicure Bilingue”, she read with a shake of her head, as if to say “What a name!”
If there was one thing Lilly Loveless regretted with the start of her Mimboland adventure, it was the fact that in her rush to get to the airport in time, she had forgotten to bring along her yellow booklet of vaccines. As a result she was detained by a no-nonsense health official at the Sawang International Airport who forcefully administered injections which he refused to accept she had had just days before.
“How do you expect me to believe that? Show me your card!” The man blared, making her feel like a child lying in broad daylight. She would not be allowed to contaminate the land of Mimbo with yellow fever, cholera and meningitis. And she paid for the vaccines at a rate more than exorbitant in money, comfort and time. The whole exercise took nearly two hours, making her virtually the last passenger to come through from immigration to the baggage area.
The scorching heat, humidity, poor ventilation and the officials’ undisguised reluctance to be understanding compounded the stifling feeling in Lilly Loveless.
By the time she had finished oiling the thick dry lips of the two lady customs officers who had insisted on looking beneath her mom’s dirty XXL underwear, which she had packed on top precisely to deter such a meticulous item by item search for God-knows-what, Dr Wiseman Lovemore, a man not gifted in patience by any standards, had given up waiting and left the airport. So Lilly Loveless, seeing no placard with her name, succumbed to the aggressive persuasion of a determined taxi man and implored: “University of Mimbo, Puttkamerstown, s’il vous plait.”
“Yi please me time no dey,” the taxi man sought to reassure her, mimicking her whiteman-woman accent, the way a child would with its fingers to the tip of its nose singing: “Whiteman with your long nose, since ma mother born me I no ba see me whiteman …” “You go pay Mim$40,000,” he told her.
“That’s too much,” she screamed. “I look for another taxi!” Dustbin had forewarned her against the exorbitant rates of the opportunistic taxi men in Sawang.
“La distance est longue. Puttkamerstown faway. Na ara kontri,” he tried to explain.
She was adamant; the amount was just too much.
“So na how much you go pay?” he asked.
“Wait a minute,” she told him, taking out her notebook. She consulted it, then said, “Not more than Mim$10,000.” That’s the amount Dustbin had advised her not to go over.
“No, no. Dat moni small plenty. No man for here go take you to Puttkamerstown for dat amount.” The driver swore. “You pay Mim$20,000 or you take ara taxi if you see am.”
Lilly Loveless studied the pros and cons of wasting more time haggling with a second, and perhaps a third and fourth taxi man, and concluded she was better off yielding. “Let’s go,” she sighed.
“But if road long, and traffic dey, you go pay more, foseka petrol dear,” the driver insisted as she entered the car.
She pretended not to understand what he said, but was determined not to pay a cent more.
“Your safety belt is unsafe,” said Lilly Loveless, as she discovered the belt had been cut into two halves.
“Na all dat I get… No fear,” he told her.
The taxi man was far from reassuring. Once he started driving, he seemed to head straight for the potholes perforating the battered roads. In his equally battered Toyota Corolla that had no shock absorbers to cushion the tortuous ride, they trotted along as if on a hoofless horse. The front and back windshields of the car were splattered with adverts, including one which touted, “My Toyota Is Fantastic.”
More like “My Toyota is in Plastic,” Lilly Loveless thought, hardly bringing herself to appreciate the irony the way she ordinarily would. To be fair though, one could have the slickest car in the world, but with roads as rubbish as this, there’s little to do but pull, dive and stumble along. Just then, she noticed a very slick car proving the point.
Lilly Loveless was amazed by the crater size potholes made worse by pools of muddy rainwater. This was testing to the limit her philosophy of ‘wetter is better’, especially as the splashes made by the passing cars stank like sewage. Rotting refuse mountains at the corner of every street were colonised by swarms of flies, maggots and rats nonchalantly fattening themselves up. Lilly Loveless and the taxi man went through swampy neighbourhoods, where the car gathered mud and children struggled with floating household refuse and sewage, as if in a sort of fashion parade. The car, which already smelt oddly, picked up more nauseating stenches as the tires grew thicker with mincemeat of unattended waste. At one point, she thought she saw a man lying in the middle of the road, perhaps dead, but no one bothered to stop and help, her own driver included. She fumed, but conversation between them was difficult, as what the taxi man said seemed to suggest the man was catching up on sleep in preparation to lose sleep as a night watchman.
If she hadn’t done her background reading, she might have thought Sawang had been at the heart of a savage war and bombing in which chaos had mass murdered order. She knew Mimboland as the peaceful armpit of a turbulent Africa, and now she was being forced to reappraise what the books had told her by the bumpy reality of a city hardly at peace with itself. The city’s roads and refuse had been totally neglected, just as the air conditioning, toilets and other facilities at the nightmare of an airport. It was as if Mimboland had gone for decades without a government, for not even a warzone devastated by warlords and years of reckless abandon could look this miserable and disabled.
She was glad to be heading for Puttkamerstown, as she simply couldn’t stand Sawang.
Though empathetic to him, Lilly Loveless was also suspicious that the taxi man was not in a hurry to bring her to her destination. He exasperated her with his backstreet options, indirections and indecisions, but she was too scared to put her foot down. The car lurched along bumpily, yet no university was in view.
At one point, the taxi man stopped abruptly and turned to her. “Whosai you say you di go?” he asked. It was evident he either didn’t know the University, or he was simply eating up time in the hope of squeezing even more out of her.
“University of Mimbo!” she scr
eamed and rolled her eyes, barely containing her mounting impatience. She could see he looked equally perplexed. She gathered courage and forced him to ask for directions.
“That’s far away from here, way out of the city,” a bendskin rider told them. “You’re in the wrong place, wrong direction,” the man looked questioningly at the taxi man, as if asking what he was doing with a taxi in a city he mastered so little. “Turn left, left again at the first roundabout, drive straight ahead for three hundred metres or so, make a right turn after the mango orchards, and drive on, looking out for the signposts for directions.”
Lilly Loveless took down notes, not sure her driver understood a thing. She would guide him. They thanked the Good Samaritan bendskin rider, and made a U-turn.
Lilly Loveless could see there were hundreds of motor bike riders like the one who had given them directions. They were picking up and dropping off passengers, apparently much abler to negotiate the potholes and traffic than the taxis that competed with them. She also noticed people on bicycles, some with crates of eggs mounted behind them. They seemed to ride so nonchalantly, unaware of the risk that, with one too-quick movement of the handlebars, a whole day of earnings could be smashed to the pavement in white and yellow glowing and moving globs punctuated by broken shells.
There was this lady, mounted on her bike, doubtless on her way to somewhere important, as she was not stopping for passengers. Lilly Loveless admired the strapless top she wore, made of a print fabric with leopard and tiger designs combined. Her two-toned braids matched her top. Some were gathered loosely on the back of her head while others tumbled to grace the space between her bare shoulders. Her long brown trousers were wide and her heels, braced against the pavement briefly for traffic to ease up, were high. Her handbag waited obediently over the handlebar of her bike…
There were lots of people on foot as well, furious and provocative in their busy-ness. The stench emitted by the farting gutters and refuse mountains made them spit in the streets as if in a spitting competition.
A few kilometres on, a nervous Lilly Loveless asked in silence: “Didn’t he turn the wrong way again?” Not to, said a voice in her, he’ll find his way.
Whatever the sights of Sawang and its inhabitants, Lilly Loveless’ mind was firmly on her fate. She was full of anecdotes about the unpredictability of this land of Mimbo, and it appeared the Mimbo people themselves made no secret of the attribute, as they would proudly proclaim: “Nothing is impossible in Mimboland.”
Lilly Loveless couldn’t contain her joy when the taxi man, after an hour and a half of countless contours and detours, eventually stopped at the entrance to the university still under active construction. A white banner held together by wooden poles and scaffolding had “University of Mimbo” inscribed in bold black letters, followed by “The Place to Be” in a much, much smaller font, almost impossible to read from any distance. She made a mental note of the contrast. She would ask Dr Wiseman Lovemore if there was more to the inscription than met the eye, although she had read somewhere that young Mimbolanders were reluctant to study at home, preoccupied as they were with dreams of seeking authentic qualifications from Muzunguland. A tall fence was being constructed around the university campus. This also she made a mental note of. She had read that this twenty-year-old university was one of the youngest in Mimboland, but she didn’t know it was this fledging, if her eyes and first impressions were to be trusted.
The plainclothes, casually dressed security guard in rubber sandals inspected the documents of the taxi man but would not touch the passport Lilly Loveless instinctively tendered him. “No need,” he smiled, and let them through.
“Dis na university, farm for book people,” said the taxi man, half serious, half mocking.
Lilly Loveless smiled comfortably for the first time since the airport.
“Whosai you wan maka drop you?”
“Department of Social Work,” she said, fidgeting with her trousers to untie her money belt.
The guard indicated the way and the taxi man proceeded to the Faculty of Social Sciences. “Ma road end for ya,” he announced, stretching out his hand.
Lilly Loveless handed him Mim$20,000, a stiff look in her eyes.
He got the message, thanked her, and drove away, a broad smile on his face. Even without the bonus he had hoped for, he was satisfied to have met a client who paid generously. Neither his wife nor his girlfriend would call him “Japanese handbrake” today. But first, he would head for the nearest kiosk to place his bet and hope on his favourite Muzunguland horse, and then prepare himself to watch the race on TV, sponsored by Pari Mutuel Urbain Mimbolandais.
It didn’t take Lilly Loveless long to locate Dr Wiseman Lovemore. He was quite well known – a solid presence on campus à la Dustbin. The first person she asked was able to take her right to his office, where he was explaining to a female student behind closed doors aspects of a lecture she had either missed or not understood, or had insisted on having as a private tutorial.
This would never happen in Muzunguland, a lecturer alone with a female student in his office, with the door closed, the thought crossed Lilly Loveless’ mind as she introduced herself.
Short, thick, big-headed, almost neck-less, and with eyes like a butterfly in a flower garden, Dr Wiseman Lovemore welcomed his guest with a smile, his mind at work – a hunter contemplating his tools in the face of game. He fumbled between an offer of tea and a seat, as he dismissed the student, mumbling something about continuing the exercise later.
Lilly Loveless was keener on sorting things out right away, so she declined the tea, which normally she would have loved, as the weather was chilly and tea with her was a way of life.
“Sorry we missed each other at the airport,” Dr Wiseman Lovemore shook hands with her warmly, slightly uncomfortable with her height and sharp, blue eyes that seemed to absorb everything they settled on. “I thought you were not on the flight, since I waited and waited…”
“I was delayed at immigration and customs, details of which I won’t bore you with.”
“Hope you didn’t have any problem finding a taxi...”
“Let’s not talk about the taxi either. Can you believe it? I get into one and ask to be taken to the University of Mimbo. The taxi man has no clue where this is, but insists on taking me, only to drive round and round. Luckily we asked someone who showed him the way at last.”
“Thank God he brought you here in one piece. It could be worse.”
“I’m not complaining.”
“I see you are married,”remarked Dr Wiseman Lovemore, abruptly.
Lilly Loveless looked at the gold ring on her finger and smiled, but said nothing. She didn’t know how to begin to tell him her mother had insisted upon the ring as a way of keeping prying and preying African men at bay.
“I know you must be tired. A quick tour of the department and the faculty, then we go,” said Dr Wiseman Lovemore, picking up his bag and leading the way.
He did a quick round of introductions in the building that housed the Department of Social Work and Faculty of Social Sciences before taking her in his car to drive round the expansive, impressive but very underdeveloped campus of the University of Mimbo.
Again, the fence under construction caught Lilly Loveless’ attention.
“This is a long and expensive fence in the making you’ve got here,” she remarked.
“Yes, and a controversial one too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Opinion is divided and there’s lots of tension in the air,” he whispered. “That’s all I can say for now. More when we are out of here.”
Lilly Loveless nodded. Dustbin hadn’t mentioned a thing about how paranoid Mimbolanders were. Or was Dr Wiseman Lovemore being overly dramatic and mysterious about the fence?
They drove back, packed his car “because petrol is damn expensive, and there is too little of it in the car. I’m just a poor lecturer.”
She smiled knowingly this time. Dustbin and other
s had already prepared her for this and a lot more.
“Financially, how we survive here at UM is difficult to say,” Dr Wiseman Lovemore unfolded his poverty. “All I know is that we beat Christ when it comes to miracles.”
Lilly Loveless took the cue. She would have to babysit him financially, if they were to socialise.
They both jumped into a taxi, with Lilly Loveless stating upfront that she would pay, which slightly wounded Dr Wiseman Lovemore’s ego, but he didn’t protest. They headed for Mountain View Hotel, where he had reserved a room for her for the first few days of her fieldwork.
The girl at the reception was fair in complexion and youthful. She had a sweet face and her dimples were merry. Lilly Loveless noticed her lips as well, poised gently and firmly, one luscious lip on the other, together they spoke even when no words moved them. Covered in a creamy gloss that let their deep natural glowing brown colour show, the girl’s lips warmed you just by looking. One turned up at an impressive angle and the other sharply down, accentuating the line that separated and brought them together.
The girl herself seemed unaware of the arresting power of those prominent lips proudly protruding. She introduced herself as Britney, part-time receptionist and full-time student, studying during the day and working evenings. “You are welcome to Mountain View.” She handed Lilly Loveless a form. “You can stay as long as you like. We are not expensive and there aren’t many customers in any case.”
Lilly Loveless smiled to herself, wondering if her employer would keep her if he heard her.
Dr Wiseman Lovemore helped Lilly Loveless to her room with her luggage and returned to wait in the dingy reception lounge while she showered.
When she came back downstairs, she looked fresh and had changed into a pair of jeans and a white shirt. She was carrying a sweater.
“I didn’t know it would be this cold in the heart of the tropics,” she told Dr Wiseman Lovemore, as she put on her sweater.